Scholars Fear 'Star' System May Undercut Their Mission

Collectors bid on Picassos, baseball teams bid on batters, television networks bid on prime-time shows. Now, in the era of academic free agency, a few dozen top universities vie with increasing intensity for much admired, much resented ''academostars.''

Bidding wars break out regularly over molecular biologists, African-American historians, mathematicians, whoever university administrators believe possess the reputation and scholarly heft to lift a department or a school up a rung in the national rankings.

They cast their bids in the arcane currency of academic compensation: not just salary, but also course load, research assistance, laboratory space, semesters off, housing subsidies, travel budgets, jobs for spouses (and even, in one case, a job for a former spouse in a joint-custody divorce).

''It's very much a part of the late 20th century, this celebrity-itis,'' said Joyce Appleby, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. ''It is the academic aspect of the fascination with instant gratification, competition and races for prestige and celebrity status.''

Consider the middle-aged associate professor at a reputable state university, earning a perfectly respectable $43,000 a year. When his book became a finalist for two of the top prizes in his field, he was catapulted into the giddy world of academic stardom.

First, even before the book was out, his university promoted him and gave him a $10,000 raise. Then a top private university offered him an additional $25,000, a reduced teaching load, tuition for his children and guaranteed paid leave if he would defect.

His university countered, more or less matching the offer. So the professor decided not to leave. The next year, two Ivy League schools approached him, promising $15,000 more. Again, his university matched the offers. After some soul-searching, he stayed, feeling exhilarated but guilty.

''I'm simultaneously proud and embarrassed,'' said the professor, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. ''You can't double your salary in two or three years and not think, 'Am I that much smarter than I was two or three years ago?' ''

There is nothing new, of course, about academics with national reputations. What has changed is the competition for their services. Top universities have stepped up their longtime efforts to lure good people from lesser schools, while upwardly mobile, lesser schools have joined the fray.

What they are hunting for are scholars with big names in their field, people who win fellowships, publish prize-winning books, redefine their subjects, professors like Edward Said at Columbia, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West at Harvard, or Judith Butler at the University of California at Berkeley.

Now Ms. Appleby is one of a number of scholars who have begun making the case in recent months that the star system is poisoning academic life, widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots and undermining the ideal of parity they say is basic to building community and morale.

The system rewards trendiness over less flashy virtues, critics say; it devalues the more ordinary hard work of academic life; it adds pressure on universities to do even more fund-raising, subtly eroding their independence, and it diverts attention from scholarship to the prestige attached to it.

Now that outside offers have become the route to a pay raise at home, some professors seem to flirt perpetually with suitors. That practice, critics say, breeds disloyalty, alienation and an insidious form of keeping up with the Joneses.

''There is a lot of low-level complaining and bitterness on many campuses about stars,'' said Cary Nelson, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who published an article about academic superstars in the magazine Academe earlier this year. ''But academia has not found a good way to discuss them openly. There's a tremendous amount of ill will but not a lot of open confrontation.''

At the same time, many scholars concede that the star system can work. They say most stars are brilliant and highly productive; they have the power to attract gifted graduate students, reinvigorate departments, improve rankings, make alumni proud and make it easier to raise money.

A Flood of Celebrities Raises Duke's Rating

The classic case in point is literary studies at Duke University, which was transformed after the arrival of Prof. Frank Lentricchia in 1985 led to the hiring of two big stars, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to head the English department and the program in literature, respectively.

Their coming brought others, including Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick and Mr. Gates (whom Harvard then lured away to do for African-American studies what Mr. Fish had done for English, and who has since become arguably the best-known academic celebrity of all).

The Duke department skyrocketed to near the top of the national rankings. According to Mr. Fish, the number of graduate-student applications rose by 300 to 400 percent over six or seven years. Now, he said, newly minted Duke Ph.D.'s regularly get jobs at Yale, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.

''The sheer number of academic stars is the principal determinant of the public's assessment of the quality of a department,'' said Jonathan Cole, the Columbia University provost. ''In academic life, you're known for your best, not for your average.''

The star system can be traced, in part, to economic pressures squeezing universities and the pervasiveness of marketing in American life. Some specifically blame the preoccupation of administrators with rankings done by academic groups and publications like U.S. News & World Report.

But something else has changed, too. David R. Shumway, an associate professor in the English department at Carnegie Mellon University, says that the rise of the conference and lecture circuits has helped create a new form of academic celebrity akin to movie and rock stardom.

In a paper published in January in the journal Publications of the Modern Language Association, Mr. Shumway described Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, as ''the jet-set academic, a professor who seems to spend more time in the air between gigs than on the ground at any particular job.''

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Long magazine profiles illustrated with photographs of tousled scholars in black turtlenecks have helped personalize their images, Mr. Shumway suggested. And recent trends in scholarship have placed issues like gender and sexuality at the center of certain fields..

''One might hazard a guess that the public visibility of the stars in some ways came about because it was the way the press preferred to deal with them,'' Mr. Shumway said, ''rather than to engage the difficult and arcane matters that they actually write about.''

Who becomes a ''poster professor,'' as the new breed has been called by Jeffrey Williams, a professor of English at East Carolina University who also coined the term academostar? Most tend to be in their 40's and 50's and in mid-career; their research is cutting-edge; many are in trendy fields like environmental history or ethnic studies with a lot of student interest and not enough teachers.

Visibility helps. Stars write articles that regularly make a splash. They appear at conferences, where they are often used to draw a crowd. Some write for mainstream publications like The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Their books win important prizes.

Alan Taylor, a 42-year-old professor of history at the University of California at Davis, was approached by several universities, including Harvard, in the first six months after his book ''William Cooper's Town'' won the Pulitzer, the Bancroft and other top prizes last year.

Harvard offered Mr. Taylor a raise if he would come. U.C. Davis matched the offer and gave him a research fund of about $5,000. In return for deciding to stay, Mr. Taylor also got U.C. Davis to create fellowships to support three graduate students in American history.

''I have to recognize that what I'm being paid to do is in some ways different than most faculty,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''In part, I'm being paid to be something of a marquee name that the university can use for its development as an indicator of the overall quality of the university.

''So I have certain responsibilities: to be available to speak on public occasions, to speak to alumni groups, to cooperate with the development office and the public relations office. I am being rewarded in part for being this sort of figure on the campus.''

Richard White, a 50-year-old professor of history at the University of Washington who specializes in environmental, Native American and the ''new Western history'', won a MacArthur ''genius'' grant in 1995 and has since been offered jobs by Yale, Harvard and Stanford.

''There can be a usual-suspects syndrome,'' he said. ''People consult me all the time about who they should recruit if they have an endowed chair. The same names come up over and over. So there is a sense of chasing the same people. And in some cases, while these people might talk, they aren't movable.''

The pursuit of superstars happens at particular moments, when, for example, several big-name professors are retiring and need to be replaced, or when a new administration comes in and opens a campaign to jump-start a school or improve its rankings.

Allen L. Sessoms became president of Queens College in 1995 and set about trying to push the college into the top 1 percent of colleges by the year 2000. One short-term strategy, he said in an interview, was ''to pull in a star who makes a statement about the quality of the institution.''

So he began looking for donors to endow chairs, a popular method of drawing in the money needed to snare a high-priced star. Then, the college recruited Luc Montagnier, a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, to fill the college's first fully endowed chair.

Mr. Montagnier's salary will be 50 percent higher than the usual $100,000 salary for distinguished professors at the college. Mr. Sessoms said that he would receive another $100,000 to cover expenses; that he would help fill five new faculty positions, and that he would have a $30 million AIDS research institute built for him.

One of the most widely criticized perks that some stars receive is a reduced teaching load. Arnold Weber, a former president of Northwestern University, recalls a faculty member's asking him to match an outside offer he had received that included not only a pay increase but also five years without teaching.

''In one of our finer moments, we said no,'' Mr. Weber recalled. And, he said, the professor left.

Thomas Bender, dean for the humanities at New York University, said that deals of that sort were ''a real corruption that cannot be defended.'' He continued, ''It makes one ask why are you recruiting a person of this quality if you are not then going to have them in the classroom.''

Questioning A Market Model

A More than any other reaction, the star system engenders mixed emotions. More power to anyone in a captive labor market who ends up well paid, some professors say; if stars bring a university fame, energy, better graduate students and good faculty, everyone benefits.

At the same time, many wonder whether the market is the wrong model for faculty recruiting. As Ms. Appleby put it, the market ignores qualities that universities value, like the nurturing of talents over a lifetime and the development of certain intellectual values.

''By adopting the market as a model, universities have turned recruitment into a national competition, much like college sports,'' she wrote in a recent column in a newsletter published by the American Historical Association, the historians' organization of which she is president.

''Where once universities relied upon their location, reputation, facilities and student body to attract new faculty members,'' she continued, ''today they are spending university money on 'off-scale' salaries, negotiated promotions and reduced teaching loads that will drain budgets for years to come.''

Correction: December 22, 1997, Monday A picture caption on Saturday with the continuation of a front-page article about the intense bidding wars for academic stars reversed two identifications. The social critic Cornel West was on the left of the bottom row and the AIDS researcher Luc Montagnier on the right of the bottom row.